Ye Olde Curiosity Shop is a store founded in 1899, on the Central Waterfront of Seattle, Washington, United States. It is currently located on Pier 54. Best known today as a souvenir shop and museum, it also has aspects of a dime museum, and is an important supplier of Northwest Coast art to museums. As of 2008, the store has been owned by four generations of the same family.
In 1933, the Seattle Star named Ye Olde Curiosity Shop one of the "Seven Wonders of Seattle", the only shop on the list. The other six Wonders were the harbor, the Ballard Locks, the Boeing airplane factory, the Seattle Art Museum, the Pike Place Market and the University District's Edmond Meany Hotel (now the Graduate Seattle hotel).
Owners
The shop was founded in 1899 by J. E. "Daddy" Standley (born February 24, 1854, in Steubenville, Ohio). He had already traded somewhat in curios and Indian goods as a grocer in Denver, Colorado. When he moved to Seattle in 1899, he encountered a boom town supplying and benefitting from the Klondike Gold Rush. He founded the business in 1899. An exhibit at the 1909 Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition in Seattle drew tourists, scholars, anthropologists and collectors and was enormous publicity for his already somewhat famous shop. It also won Standley a gold medal in the category of ethnological collections.
Standley's shop presented a jumbled mix of curiosities and significant art objects. He collected and sold what came his way, but also had local Native American artists make objects to his specifications. He sold genuine Tlingit totem poles, but also replicas by carvers descended from the Vancouver Island-based Nuu-chah-nulth tribe, who were living in Seattle, and even inexpensive souvenir totem poles made in Japan. A flair for the bizarre and grotesque led him to include items such as shrunken heads from the Amazon (some of them definitely genuine, others probably not).
In addition to the shop, Standley built a home he called "Totem Place" on a estate in West Seattle. The estate's collection of totem poles, whale bones, and other curiosities replete with a Japanese-style teahouse and a miniature log cabin drew sightseeing tourists.
In 1937 Standley, at the age of 83, was hit by a car on Alaskan Way, the road along the Seattle waterfront, and his leg was broken. He never fully recovered, although he remained active in the business to within 4 days of his death on October 25, 1940. Standley's son Edward joined the shop in 1907 and worked there until his death in 1945. Russell James first joined the business in 1912 and eventually married Standley's daughter. Except for his service in World War I, James worked there until 1952. Standley's grandson Joe James began working in the shop in 1946, and operated the business for over 50 years. Joe James's son Andy and daughter Debbie were also involved in running the business from at least the 1980s.
The shop's current owners, the aforementioned Andy James and his wife Tammy, also owned Market Street Traders (founded 2007 closed 2010) in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood. Market Street Traders specialized in fair trade goods. Prior to that, for about 25 years, the Jameses operated a second waterfront store on Pier 55, known at various times as Waterfront Landmark and Ye Olde Curiosity Shop Too. Ye Olde Curiosity Shop Too closed around the same time Market Street Traders opened.
Name and location
Ye Olde Curiosity Shop was founded in late 1899 as Standley's Free Museum and Curio on Second Avenue at Pike Street. It moved in November 1901 and at that time the store was called The Curio; it soon became Standley's Curio. In June 1904 Standley moved his store to the waterfront, renamed it after Charles Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop, and adopted the motto "Beats the Dickens."
In 1963, as the Washington State Ferries system was taking over and completely reworking Colman Dock, the shop moved to a store designed by Paul Thiry.
Customers
The shop receives about 1 million visitors a year. The shop has had many notable customers over the years. Visitors have included Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Jack Dempsey, Charlie Chaplin, Red Skelton, John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, James Van Der Beek, and Sylvester Stallone. Cartoonist Robert Ripley of "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" bought totem poles and other crafts for his New York estate. The store's logs show that Queen Marie of Romania visited and "sat in the Chinese chair" and that Louis Tiffany bought "curios, idols and a mammoth tusk,"
As late as the period from 1976 though 1980, the shop auctioned off 2,000 pieces of Native American art.